Newest police beat: patrolling the Internet

ARLINGTON, VA. — Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Second Life, police Lt. Charles Cohen asks a room of about 75 law enforcement officers from around the country.

Second Life, a sprawling online universe, has had technology circles abuzz for a while. But here, only a few hands go up; Cohen must explain.

Welcome to the traveling classroom of this fast-talking Indiana state trooper, who insists that officers need to incorporate the online world into their patrols. Cohen’s lectures are not meant for police computer teams that perform skillful forensic analysis on hard drives and specialize in nailing online predators.

He’s trying to reach other law enforcement personnel: beat cops, homicide detectives and investigators who don’t think that monitoring the Internet is their responsibility.

More and more, such boundaries don’t make sense. Whether it’s on MySpace, Facebook or Second Life, criminals and victims -- especially young ones -- are leaving clues in plain sight online, even for offline crimes. Things people once wrote in diaries now cascade through websites that stimulate free expression -- and are open to anyone.

Recently, a detective in Newark, N.J., tracked the alleged killers of three college students by mining MySpace pages maintained by the suspects and their friends. And pictures and prose posted online by the killer of Taylor Behl, a 17-year-old Virginia college freshman, connected him to the victim and led to the discovery of her body.

In an Indiana case in which Cohen helped, a young man wrote on his MySpace page: “I just killed two cops.” (One officer survived the shooting.)

“People under 25 tend to think about what is public versus private information differently from the rest of us, and that is great for law enforcement investigators,” Cohen, 37, tells his audience in Arlington, at a conference of the National White Collar Crime Center. Later, he said in an interview, “Your computer usage is in some ways a window into your soul.”

But the anonymity and the sheer scope of the Internet also can make it easier for criminals to cover their tracks. The trick for police is to figure out how to keep up -- which is difficult because most police departments have to concentrate their limited resources on reacting to crimes.

Les Lauziere, a computer crimes investigator for the Virginia attorney general who was part of the Behl case, suggests that police incorporate Internet analysis into just about every investigation.

Steven DeBrota, a federal prosecutor in Indiana, argues that too much separation between cyber-specialists and other officers can be dangerous.

Typically, he says, detectives will transfer a suspect’s computer to forensic examiners, who might need months to produce a full report on the contents. In that time, DeBrota fears, the opportunity to find a suspect’s associates or additional victims may be lost.

So DeBrota has pushed an alternative approach in Indiana. Now computer specialists get out of their labs and assist detectives on sweeps and arrests. At the same time, front-line officers have been trained to do some of the basics. They can take hard drives out of computers, attach “write-blocking” clips that prevent data from being altered, then do initial, targeted searches for evidence -- Google searches typed, videos watched -- that might be valuable in interrogations.

For all the logic of this approach, it is far from common. At best, several departments have launched profiles on social networking sites like MySpace, so people can report tips or informally chat with officers.

“Not everyone watches the news at night. Not everyone reads the paper. Not everyone even reads news online. But it seems like everyone is on MySpace,” says Stephanie Slater, a police spokeswoman in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Yet for all that MySpace reveals in its 200 million profiles, it’s just one of innumerable online avenues. Spending time in Cohen’s class shows how hard it is to track them all.

He suggests ways to hunt for clues not only on better-known social networking zones like Facebook and MySpace but also on Xanga, Bebo and Orkut. Given that people often don’t use real names online, officers might have to ask friends of suspects and victims not only where they hang out in the physical world, but also in cyberspace.

The answers probably go beyond social networking sites. People jabber in Second Life or through chat programs in online games like World of Warcraft. Sometimes they don’t say much but show a lot on real-time video sites like Stickam.

Each of those sites has different procedures required of officers who want to match anonymous user names with the Internet protocol address behind them. More work is needed to ask an Internet service provider to cough up the IP address holder’s real name and address, assuming it wasn’t a cybercafe or library.

Investigators say most sites cooperate with subpoenas, warrants and other requests for help. In particular, MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has a former federal prosecutor as its head of security and maintains valuable logs on site activity for at least 90 days. Some sites maintain logs for much less time, if at all.

To listen to Cohen is to walk through dark corners of the Internet. There are gang members boasting on MySpace, killers revealing their obsessions on LiveJournal, teenagers sharing drug-making tips on YouTube.

Yet Cohen, in a cop’s matter-of-fact manner, is measured in his approach. “It’s like any community, communities we all live in. There are going to be criminals in it,” he says.

Cohen began his career with the Indiana State Police like any other trooper, writing speeding tickets and responding to accidents. Eventually he moved into fraud and corruption cases, and found that his work increasingly included an online component.

At one session of his recent conference, Cohen’s audience nods as he shows how officers can plumb public pages of social networking sites to get to know people before questioning them.

But his pupils have trouble accepting the particulars of Second Life, where people chat, shop, trade stuff and have sex -- and, in Cohen’s estimation, launder money occasionally -- through animated characters known as avatars.

“Is this for people who don’t want social contact?” one investigator asks.

Cohen shakes his head as if to say it’s not that simple. “This,” he says, “is our new world.”